A backup strategy

Over the years I have covered backup strategies with punters on a regular basis. A lot of people still backup as follows:

Monday to Friday, full backup.

So that is 5 jobs and 5 sets of tapes. Anything over one week old is gone and if you are backing up corrupt data means you have a problem.

More adventurous people do this across a 2 or even 4 week period. Let's look at the 4 week example:

Upsides:
You get a backup each night for 4 weeks. This is whether you are doing full, incremental or differential backups during the week.

Downsides:
It takes 20 jobs to give you 4 weeks worth of backups and you have nothing beyond that.

There are of course numerous other ways you could do this, but I have been known to talk (extensively and about everything, but I shall confine myself to this topic for now) about the backup strategy I use at corp.

Monday to Thursday. Full backup, reused every week.
Friday - Weeks 1 to 12. Full backup, reused every 13 weeks.
Friday - Week 13. Full backup, never reused and termed "Q4 2006" or similar. The jobs must be unique names otherwise you have trouble restoring from multiple jobs with the same name.

So now we have 4 jobs for midweek, 12 jobs for Fridays and 1 job per quarter that never gets overwritten. The above 20 jobs over 4 weeks with its downsides is now 20 jobs over one year with restore options every day for a week, every week for 3 months and every 3 months for the year.

Now my pattern response on the subject can be "I blogged about that". :-)